How do you know it's even the same person/people doing this hack vs. any other anonymous hack? If they are "avoiding the big dogs", who are "they"? The leaders of anonymous who may or may not exist? If someone writes graffiti on a Bank of America building signed "anonymous" are you going to say it looks like they decided to go after the banks? It sounds like you're trying to make sense of what could be basically random actions by diverse non-connected groups of individuals. Maybe some are 4-channers, m

There are more than enough bad guys out there that CAN'T reach you, I'd rather have them pestering "safe targets" for a while rather than them going after the bigger fish, and getting killed or deported.

I also thought the whole thing with "Targeting the Zetas" was probably just "for the lulz," in the first place. I mean, it's a pretty low-tech operation. I wasn't quite clear how Anonymous would have gotten their hands on identities of corrupt officials working with the zetas, proof of their corruption,

There are more than enough bad guys out there that CAN'T reach you, I'd rather have them pestering "safe targets" for a while rather than them going after the bigger fish, and getting killed or deported.

You have seen what many Muslim people do when they are upset/mad/in a bad mood, right?

Freedom from religion would be better. That way, you could have your religion (in your basement, in the dark (as it should be - you alone comuning with your sky fairy)), and nobody would bother persecuting you for it. Everyone wins.

That way, you could have your religion (in your basement, in the dark (as it should be - you alone comuning with your sky fairy)), and nobody would bother persecuting you for it. Everyone wins.

Oh really? But isn't communicating with sky fairies sign of madness and people who do that should get a mental treatment? Why not put a camera in every basement - that's the only way to find all the people who need to be cured, and to get rid of the terrible disease known as religion once and for all!

Freedom from religion would be better. That way, you could have your religion (in your basement, in the dark (as it should be - you alone comuning with your sky fairy)), and nobody would bother persecuting you for it. Everyone wins.

So you would support some crazy KKK person having freedom from dining with black people? No? You are free to practice your religious belief that you have no religion in your mother's basement if you wish but that freedom does not mean that you get to dictate whether other people are allowed to practice their faith in public. If you want to be "free" from interacting with religious people then stop trolling in stories like this one and stay in your basement dwelling. It is up to you to remove yourself from t

Anonymous seems to just have its fingers in the wind these days, shifting its sites all over the placewith no real direction or purpose. I mean, they even took down the Boston Police Department's website because the city forced the Occupy Wall Street wackos out of Dewey Square after letting them squat there for months.

Anonymous seems to just have its fingers in the wind these days, shifting its sites all over the placewith no real direction or purpose.

Who said they have any real direction or purpose? It's a big amorphous group of whoever wants to participate in whatever popular idea is floating around at the time, they don't have any long-term plan.

This. One person saying they are the spokesperson for anon would be like me standing up and saying I speak for all of America. Anon's own biggest enemy is anon and always will be. It is the embodiment of chaos and randomness.

So, when Anonymous hacked Vatican's site, they were against religion, but now they say they are not? I guess they need to take a more cautious approach when they know tomorrow could be thousands of angry people on the street screaming for their beheading.

It's a continuum. Basically the more control the religous authorities try to exert over what the adherents think and do, the more it moves towards the cult end of the scale. People that want to categorise things one way or the other draw their own arbitrary line at some point on the continuum.

Anonymous is anonymous. It's a movement without any specific ideology behind their motives. There is no unity on anything they do. Accept for one. Anonymous can rest at ease that whatever actions they perform can happen safely and securely behind a wall of anonymity.

As an outsider looking looking to group them to an ideology (false premise), you'll just end up confused viewing them as schizophrenic. Don't do that. It's the wrong prism by which to view them.

I'd argue that with that kind of classification it can hardly be called a "movement". Viewed from the outside they don't look schizophrenic, rather it looks like anyone who wants to stir up some trouble can just claim to be from Anonymous and thus get extra media attention towards what has been done. Since there is no common ground or movement, it's not possible to say that you're sympathetic to the cause either because the question would then become "what cause?".

There is a cause and there is a movement. To simply have a safe venue by which to vent anger and frustration without reprisal. The members that make up "anonymous" are from all walks of life, country, religion, race, and culture. You name it. A bit cowardly if you ask me. But there you go.

It sounds like the people behind this particular attack against the Tunisian government are Tunisian citizens, and therefore Muslim. The group behind the Vatican attacks were probably Western in residency. Remember, Anonymous is like al-Qaeda: anyone can claim the name, as both are an idea more than an actual organization. And to address this particular case, this was always the worry that the Arab Spring would bring out Islamist governments to replace authoritarian, dictatorial, regimes. However, we we

There are two points to consider with the whole Arab Spring Islamist thing:

1) The Islamist groups were often the only form of resistance against an unpopular dictator. People joining or supporting those groups weren't necessarily hardcore Islamists. Consider that the Islamist groups that fought against Gadaffi turned out to be our allies, and openly called for democratic elections. Also consider the Polish uprisings against Communism - the uprisings had many religious overtones (martyrdom, use of the Chri

So if you can't grasp the concept of what anonymous is, each time you read it in relation to a story like this, mentally replace it with "A group of hackers".

Things will start making sense then.

Anonymous isn't one person or group, it's many groups sharing the same name. Your argument doesn't make sense, it's like seeing a green car and saying "What the hell? I thought all cars were white, why is this one different?" - there are many different colours of car,

This counter tactic won't work for the Islamist sites that need to be populist, but it will work for the ones who have enough men, guns and money to seize power and control through fear, intimidation or murder.

Basically, if you attack them, they can simply murder some innocent person related to you. Say, find someone who studies computers and whether you declare this 'computer' thing an evil or not, simply murder them and publicize that they died in response to the attack. They would just be interested in

You DO know "agnostic" and "atheist" are orthogonal right? All religions, as well as atheism, are belief claims, while a claim of agnosticism simply means "I do not put the same kind of confidence in this belief as I would in something derived deductively from prior principles." For example, an agnostic atheist says "I have no particular God belief, but this does not mean there never is, was, or will be a God or Gods in any place, time, or meaning."

When they hack a company/organization, that group is more resolved than ever to keep doing what they're doing, except now with improved net security. They are strengthening the resolve and defenses of who they claim to hate!

I have family living in one of those countries (Morocco), and all of them saw it coming, and constantly said so, long before Ben Ali fled Tunisia. The problem with the "Arabellion" was that it came too early, in the midst of a huge wave of Islamism that has been sweeping the region since at least the 1990ies and that is still virulent and highly contagious today. Before this, there were already democratization tendencies in place and going along nicely, albei

Because nothing says "Fight the power" like hacking a website in Outer Buttfuckistan.Especially when the Outer Buttfuckistani government is going to hush the incident up locally.And isn't likely to raid your house like they do when you script-kiddie domestically.

I'd prefer they hacked rather than not, and I think we can all agree "the internets" do indeed have "fight the power" power. Will this hack change anything? Maybe not but it costs little except the effort and inaction is ineffective...

While it is highly charged, and there may be some disagreement about the precise definition of the term, it most certainly is a word. You're free to dislike its usage all you like, but that won't change the fact that it is a word.

You can defend it's usage all you like, but that wont change the fact that Islamist is a pejorative invented by non-Muslims to disparage Muslims, same as "Democrat Party" is used by Republicans to disparage their political opponents. You can find lots of references [wikipedia.org] for that, too.

"Democrat Party" is a political epithet used in the United States instead of "Democratic Party" when talking about the Democratic Party.[1]

Regardless of how you feel about that word, or any word for that matter, your opinions are meaningless on their own. Any word can emerge as a neologism and as for the term "Islamist", it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary and is used commonly enough that nobody is going to "stop using it please." Perhaps you are transferring your animosity toward the group mentioned with the term itself. I can understand that...

You can also find definitions for "Santorum", when Googled. Doesn't mean that it's a valid term. "Islamist" is a pejorative used by non-Muslims to disparage Muslims, same as how "Democrat Party" is used by Republicans.